Description:
This paper outlines a study of an alternate approach to educating Year 9 students in a residential setting. The School for Student Leadership (SSL) in Victoria, Australia, provides a nine-week program focusing on leadership, relationship-building and self-awareness. The philosophy of the school, which has continually evolved since its inception in 2000, appears to have strong connections with the principles of cooperative learning, while also being influenced by theories relating to experiential and service learning and adolescent leadership development. A mixed methods approach was used to collect data through surveys and focus group interviews relating to student perceptions of their educational experience at the SSL. The qualitative findings presented in this paper suggest that all five elements of cooperative learning, as theorized by Johnson and Johnson (1989; 2009), feature in students' discussions of their experiences and that cooperative learning within this context provides a unique platform for the development of positive attitudes toward learning and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Description:
In this paper we use an example of when students appear not to have learnt from their experience to examine some of the 'orthodoxies' of experiential education. This frames a discussion exploring how it is possible for a teacher to declare that students have got it 'wrong' in relation to learning from experience. It is argued that both learning through experience and who has experiences is viewed through specific forms of reason within contemporary experiential education. The paper concludes with a challenge to open reason up to greater scrutiny in experiential education and consider the possibilities that emerge through the indeterminacy of relationships inherent in experience and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]